The End of Learning Skills in New Eden

CCP Greyscale posted today that all learning skills will be removed from EVE Online shortly.

The skill books will be off the market by tomorrow this time and the skills themselves will be removed when they are ready, which sounds like between now and Christmas.

On the down side, I spent some time and effort a long while back training up learning skills to speed up other training.  At my last marker, I had 4,805,803 skill points in learning.  Not an inconsiderable percentage of my 60 million skill points.

On the bright side, players will be getting something to compensate for the loss of the skills.  From the post:

• All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
• All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
• This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
• All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
• The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.
• Miscellaneous other cleanup tasks will be performed that are not very interesting, details available on request.

Which means, if nothing else, that I should be able to continue on training at my current rate, plus I will have that 4.8 million skill points to invest in other skills.

More details about what is happening are in the post.

As to the “why” of it, all I could get out of it was that people don’t like learning skills to help learn skills.